Ernestine the Expat: Romanticism

22 January 2020

Musée de la Vie Romantique

Montmartre, Paris

I was gutted by this painting.

First of all, you should know that Romanticism is, in aesthetic and philosophy, something I base my life on.

Based on a ballad, it depicts Lénore, a woman who desperately waits for the return of her lover Wilhelm, who is at war. She is transported by a mysterious soldier who, in reality, is nothing more than a skeleton in armor, to the world of the dead.

Having just left my lover behind across an ocean, this gave me chills. The things we wouldn’t do, and the timelessness of that potent craving to be with those we have chosen to completely lose all our marbles to love.

So, ok, he’s not at war or anything, but we have agreed to meet in Italy in the summer. That is the sum total of where our relationship is. Zero additional plans, labels, or information. And given where I am, I think you can forgive my melodrama.

The Romanticists ate and breathed melodrama; although, perhaps one should just say drama, because to the prefix blunts the thing. (It also blunts the validity of my own emotions, which I do to myself often. I am trying to exorcise this from my internal dialogue, now that I’m alone in foreign climes and we have to completely shift for ourselves.*) Hence, I feel rather chuffed to have found this museum today, because a central question of this—rumspringe? Escape from Tyranny? Search for economic and political asylum by a battered whore? What the fuck are we calling this thing? Anyhow—is not only Is There A Better Life Way Over Here Where People and Laws Are Different and Make Sense, but also, Is This Love Over? Or Are We Just Hitting Pause?

Many of you know and have been fascinated by the fact that, for the majority of my career, I have been sometimes-more, sometimes-less happily in love with a man whom I called my partner. He is unbelievably supportive of my job, and on the few occasions when bad shit went down with Ernestine, he was on the spot, knew just what to do, drew the bath, made the cocktails, mopped up the tears. The problem is with us fiery southern Italians…well, things got tempestuous. Then things got sad. Then things started to feel borderline mutually abusive, and so I took this as further instruction from the fairies to get the hell out of the fucking US of A, and thus—in as operatic a fashion as possible—I set my exit date for deep winter 2019, the idea being that, at that time of year, I would have to rip my heart out of my chest for my lover, my cats, our beautiful home, and the sweet part of New England that has sheltered all of us for the past 4 years, but not my garden. If it was high summer and my poppies were in bloom, this would have actually made me throw up, not just threaten to. I don’t know if I could have done it.

Ah. So, here I am, in Paris, the city I intended to move to from a zygote, if amniotic fluid can contain the heart’s most fervent desires (my mother is the biggest Francophile I know, having passed a few years at the Sorbonne, unable to rid herself of dreams of Paris every waking and sleeping moment since). And what a beauty she is, and what a massive clusterfuck I find myself in. I have talked a good game. I genuinely thought I was brave. That the dream of life in liberty (and understand the power of this—that you live somewhere where the powers that be consider your life disposable, and then you realize that a place exists where you will be not only tolerated but cherished by the fabric of society), resplendent as that is, could not forestall the longing and homesickness—yes, homesickness, for a place in a country that is as backward as possible without actually gassing anyone to death—I now feel that I cannot soothe the pain where my roots used to be. This is rather crushingly disappointing. I envisioned myself as a strong, independent woman, soldiering righteously off to the promised land because she refused to live in tyranny, and if boyfriends and cats miss me in the process, never mind, because it is better to live in liberty and safety and to not contribute to a system so perverted and disgusting that a white prostitute is the least of the creatures meriting extermination. But, as he sings in a sweet, extremely endearing, off-tune voice but with a perfect Neopolitan accent:

“Dai diamanti non nasce niente, dal letame nascono i fior.”**

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*I’m not such an egotist that I use the “royal we.” Ok, well, sometimes. But primarily I mean—and this is actually one of the entire points of moving my life to a decriminalized shelter for the hooker weary of the emotionally and physically caustic trappings of criminality—ok, this sentence has gotten a little ridiculous. What is the best way to explain this… Do you do tarot readings? I did one with my sweetie right before we left, and for “goal” in the spread, I drew the Two of Swords:

a card which indicates an impasse between two mutually exclusive choices: a stalemate. This seemed odd, as you might imagine. Impasse? As the goal? And then I remembered: “Aha!” I am, in actual fact, two people: Ernestine and my civilian counterpart. Have you ever tried being two people? Remembering when to introduce yourself as Ernestine and when as—aha! You thought you had me—must be observed with almost obsessive stricture, because to get the name wrong in any given setting could, on the one hand (a) reveal one’s very unusual, super-Italian name to someone with possibly dire consequences for one’s liberty and safety or (b) reveal to a loved one that you’ve been lying to them about your entire career for a long-ass time.

So, perchance, the universe is like, “Maybe let’s stop ruining your health and sanity this year. Maybe Ernestine and You should be the same person. Chill the fuck out.”

Just a theory.

** “Nothing grows out of precious diamonds,

Out of shit, the flowers grow.”